Sparkles

Sparkles is a company that makes design accessible to everyone through the use of user-friendly online software. A personal invitation, a business card, a sophisticated local marketing campaign: with our platforms, businesses and consumers easily create personalized products that impress their target audiences.

Matthijs Schalk, marketing & innovation officer at Sparkles, talks about how Tableau and Alteryx are used and how he experiences working with The Information Lab.

What is your role and what does your organization do?

Through our webshops, thousands of people personalize and order cards and matching products for the most important moments in life: birth cards, wedding cards, greeting cards, invitations and bereavement cards. In addition to the Netherlands and Belgium, we are active in Germany and have ambitious plans for further expansion to more products and countries. Some of our shops are madeformoments.nl, prettyorange.be and prettyorange.de

As marketing & innovation officer, I help think of new strategies and tactics to make our customers even happier and Sparkles continue to grow. Together with the teams, we implement new ideas every time and go for delivering ultimate value to our customers. We continuously conduct experiments to discover what works and what doesn't.

What do you guys use Tableau / Alteryx for?

We use Tableau for our daily performance. A number of colleagues literally get up with it and go to bed with it. Then we have the analytics, where teams analyze specific segments, product groups or other things. 

Alteryx has helped us make Tableau reports much faster. The preparations are only a fraction of the size and complexity that we previously had entirely in Tableau. We've also gotten a much better handle on things where previously we were steering primarily by feel. For example, we now use a customer journey dashboard, where data from a customer journey is aggregated from multiple sources and tables. 

Why did you choose Tableau / Alteryx?

Tableau is very versatile and relatively easy to learn. Its visualizations provide stakeholders with quick and clear insight. And in my opinion, Tableau is still the crème de la crème for data visualization, with an accessible licensing model.

Alteryx connects well to our infrastructure and provides enormous possibilities and flexibility for data preparation. Compared to in-house code, Alteryx offers great advantages, including the merging of data from different sources and, of course, the fact that far fewer developers are needed.

What results have you achieved with this?

Within seconds we can see how the business is doing. That and the depth with which we can manage data-driven makes it possible for us to grow again and again in competitive markets. 

What has TIL contributed to this?

The Information Lab helped us get started with Tableau in the first place and later with Alteryx. The support and advice from TIL is very pleasant, knowledgeable and very warm. The idea that you can just call or email and get an adequate response makes The Information Lab a reliable partner.

Want to read more about how our customers are successful with Tableau, Alteryx, Snowflake and how we help them do it? Read more customer success stories here.